27th
Dream
I dreamt that I was going out on book tour again. But I was also moving out of my place—to DC, for some reason. Maybe I was joining the Obama administration. And then I had a reading the next night in Chicago. So my plan was to drive my U-Haul to DC and then to Chicago. Not a bad plan, depending on the price of gas. Maybe in my dream the price of gas was very low.
I had packed up all my stuff in the U-Haul. And I locked it up with my combination gym lock and left it overnight on the street. Then I had to go somewhere so I left the keys with Chad, in case it needed to be moved.
The next day I came back and the street was empty and my U-Haul had been obliterated. It had been hit by a rocket, literally—-there was nothing left but just a scrap of metal on the street that said “U-Haul” on it, in the place where my U-Haul had been.
“Yeah,” said Chad. “I went down to the U-Haul place and told them about it. They were uncharacteristically nice about the deposit. They said it was no problem.”
There wasn’t a war on or anything; but I guess there was occasional rocket fire on our street. There was an undercurrent of anxiety in the dream about whether I had taken only liability insurance as well as damage-to-the-truck insurance. But mostly it was just that all my stuff had been vaporized. And in the dream I started enumerating all the stuff: Books; some old papers; my cinderblock bookshelves that I’ve been lugging around for ten years; some clothes I no longer liked; my father’s old green kitchen table; some chairs.
I didn’t need that stuff at all.
But how was I going to get to Chicago?
That was my dream.
